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let them take the child. At least not today.
     
    Maggie held Cody close as she descended the staircase. She could feel the beating of the little girl’s heart against her own.
     
    “Jenna, Eric . . .” she began, holding Cody tight. “Please try to understand what I’m going to say because it’s very, very important. I believe Cody belongs with her mother, If Jenna is able to care for her—but this isn’t the proper way to accomplish that. You must see how shockingly difficult this is for me and Cody . . . she’s never known any home but this, any family but me and Maria . . .”
     
    “That is precisely what we’re her to remedy,” Eric cut in smoothly. “Prolonging the good-byes is not going to make them easier, Maggie.”
     
    “Why must there be good-byes?” Maggie demanded, “Why can’t you just let her learn to love you, before you take her away from all that makes her secure?”
     
    Everything that happened next occurred so fast it was just a ghastly blur. Cody wrapped her arms and legs around Maggie and began to shriek, as Jenna tired to pry her free from Maggie’s grip. Cody, terrified and defiant, hit Jenna squarely in the jaw, and Eric, who’d been waiting a chance to pounce, roughly yanked the baby away form the two women.
     
    “No!” Maggie screamed. “Don’t do this!” But Eric was already heading out the door. “She’s only three years old. She doesn’t understand why you’re doing this!”
     
    “She will Maggie,” he called over his shoulder, sprinting down the steps, Cody flailing pitifully in his arms.
     
    Maggie ran after them, grappling for the child, but Eric and Jenna were too fast for her, in a screech of tires the huge car pulled away from the curb. Maggie could see Cody’s stricken face pressed against the rear window screaming soundlessly.
     
    Feeling as if her heart had been torn from her breast, Maggie clutched the porch railing, stunned, tear-blind and heedless of the cold or the stares of passerby. She sank to the steps, put her head in her hands, and wept.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    I t had been thirty days since the Tiffany card arrived from Jenna, with an Address in Greenwich, and the admonition to stay away for a month “so Cody could adjust to her new surroundings.”
     
    Maggie checked the directions Scotch-taped to the dashboard of her Volvo, and turned off the Merritt Parkway onto Round Hill Road, pushing the trip odometer back to 000 so she could monitor the 2.8 miles to her next turn. Left at the stop light, left again after the church brought her into horse country. Tiny buds were trying to force back the gray-brown barrenness of winter, with minimal success, but the cold wind had lost some of its bite. Under ordinary circumstances Maggie would have taken pleasure in the late-winter landscape and the Connecticut air. Today, only one thing mattered; Cody was somewhere around the next bend in the road. Cody, whose beloved voice she hadn’t heard in a month, would soon be in her arms again, laughing and chattering; easing the fears that had nagged her night and day since the awful moment of Jenna’s return. How tragic it was that what should have been a joyous reunion had gone so awry. There had to be way to meant the wounds.
     
    Every child belongs with her mommy, she’d reminded herself ten thousand times, since the horror of parting. If Jenna was well, as she seemed to be, she and Cody would love each other, and be good to each other, as God intended. And Maggie would be a grandmother, like other grannies. She would spoil the child with trips to F.A.O Schwarz and Rumpelmayer’s. They would do the zoo together, and the Museum of Natural History. She would teach her, and love her indulgently, as other grandmothers did, with none of the hardship or responsibility of parenting. Maggie recited all these perfectly sensible arguments for the umpteenth time, and didn’t feel better in the least. Caring for Cody had been more blessing that obligation;